'Beat Army' rings deep for Navy officer

Morse High alum, local Navy lieutenant commander was Midshipmen team captain in 1997

Lt. Cmdr. Gery Alota (center) shows off his Midshipmen pride in an all-Army school yearbook. Alota will be celebrating the annual Army-Navy game along with several other Academy grads on December 14 at Randy Jones All-American Sports Grill.

Lt. Cmdr. Gery Alota (center) shows off his Midshipmen pride in an all-Army school yearbook. Alota will be celebrating the annual Army-Navy game along with several other Academy grads on December 14 at Randy Jones All-American Sports Grill.

So there was Lt. Cmdr. Gervy Alota, set to receive his master’s degree from the very same school, the United States Army Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth, Kan. Alota, Annapolis ’98, was one of the few Navy officers accepted annually into the leadership college.

A Navy brat from the Navy stronghold that is San Diego, Alota had gotten physically ill before starting at free safety in each of his four Army-Navy games. Similarly unable to stomach the thought of being pictured for posterity in the Army college’s yearbook — completely surrounded by enemy officers on every page — Alota waited until right before the photographer’s click to tear open the shirt of his Navy blues and reveal the two words underneath:

“Beat Army!”

“I got grief for that,” said Alota, proudly looking at the picture with his wife Bernice, a Montgomery High product and fellow U.S. Naval Academy grad. “The general called me in, sat me down, opened up the yearbook to my page and said, ‘Are you kidding me? Are you blanking kidding me?’

Lt. Cmdr. Gery Alota talks about playing football for the Naval Academy and his unusual pre-game ritual. Alota will be celebrating the annual Army-Navy game along with several other Academy grads on December 14.

Lt. Cmdr. Gery Alota talks about playing football for the Naval Academy and his unusual pre-game ritual. Alota will be celebrating the annual Army-Navy game along with several other Academy grads on December 14.

“I said, ‘Sir, I had to make my mark here.’ The general was stern and started to really scold me. But then he said (lowering voice), ‘That was pretty cool.’ He turned his head and started to smile. He said, ‘Pretty ballsy.’ ”

The picture ran — uncensored. Mark made.

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Selected for his first Navy command, Alota is soon to become executive officer of the USS Comstock, a dock landing ship based in San Diego. Having just wrapped up training sessions in Newport, R.I., Alota plans to be one of several hundred local Annapolis alums watching the 113th Army-Navy game on television Saturday.

The more veteran among them will be at Randy Jones All-American Sports Grill in Mission Valley. Expected to be on hand, or on deck, are a few who played with celebrated quarterback Roger Staubach and the Middies when they beat Army on Dec. 7, 1963, a solemn occasion in that it came two weeks after former PT boat commander John F. Kennedy had been assassinated.

At the same time today, a larger contingent of more recent Naval Academy alums will gather to watch the game at the Pacific Beach Shore Club.

And when the final gun sounds, win or lose, the local USNA grads will stand at attention in the restaurant and sing the “Blue and Gold” alma mater.

“It’s just such an amazing, beautiful scene,” said Bernice Alota, Class of ’99, now a teacher at High Tech Middle School. “You’ve got all these different generations standing together. It’s such a shared experience between the people who all went through (the rigors of academy life), the only people who know what it’s really like. There’s a very, very cool connection there.”

San Diego being one of the country’s preeminent Navy and Marine towns, West Point alums here may find themselves feeling far more outnumbered than Alota did at Ft. Leavenworth. Worse yet for them, the Black Knights have lost 11 straight Army-Navy games, meaning that eight complete classes have gone through West Point without a single win over their archrival.